Greatest Underdogs in Sports History

In honor of Linsanity—Jeremy Lin and nine more zero-to-hero athletes.

Jeremy Lin, the surprising, second-year starting point guard of the New York Knicks, has taken the nation by storm. (It was hard enough to write that sentence without using one Lin pun.) No matter what your take is on Lin, the fact that is abundantly clear is that the dude can ball. Why it took this long for all of us to find out is anyone’s guess.

Nonetheless, there have been other instances in sports history when athletes have risen from minor or total obscurity to become champions, phenoms, or simply put, feel good stories for everyone to embrace. Here are 10 examples of guys who fought their way from the bottom to the top.

After over two weeks of Lin puns (i.e., Linsanity, Linning, Super Lintendo) and countless media reports on everything from his race to his legitimacy; Jeremy Lin seems unphased. And while everyone and their mother didn’t see his meteoric rise coming, Lin dreamed of playing in the NBA since childhood. Of course, his career path was far from conventional. Lin received no athletic scholarships coming out of Palo Alto High School and went undrafted by the NBA after four years at Harvard.

Despite being overlooked, Lin dazzled at the 2011 NBA Summer League and signed with his hometown Golden State Warriors. He rode the pine for most of his rookie season, and this past December was cut by both the Warriors and Houston Rockets. The New York Knicks scooped him off waivers two days after Christmas, and after breaking out against the New Jersey Nets on Feb. 4, the rest is, as they say, history.

The NFL has been a goldmine for underdogs thanks in part to the undeniable difficulty in evaluating players during draft season. It’s the only reason Tom Brady—a four-year quarterback out of Michigan—was taken in the sixth round (199th overall) of the 2000 NFL Draft by the New England Patriots. Brady, who was once as low as seventh on the quarterback depth chart at Michigan, was possessed to prove all those who doubted him wrong, and got his big chance in Week 2 of the 2001 NFL season when starter Drew Bledsoe went down with an injury.

Brady took over and never looked back—leading New England to its first Super Bowl title and becoming the then-youngest quarterback to ever win the big game. He has since added two more Super Bowl rings and two MVP trophies to his resume, and will go down as one of the game’s greatest all-time players. (Just not in the minds of Giants fans.)

If you polled every Super Bowl MVP in NFL history, it’s likely that only one of them has “shelf stocker at grocery store” on their post-college resume. Yes, Kurt Warner, after going undrafted at the 1994 NFL Draft, found himself at Hy-Vee grocery store in his hometown of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, earning $5.50 an hour.

While it looked like his football career reached the end of the line before it even started, Warner never gave up the dream, latched onto the Iowa Barnstormers of the Arena Football League (AFL) in 1995, and played three stellar seasons, culminating in two straight trips to the ArenaBowl. (The Super Bowl of the AFL, duh.) In 1999, as a backup for the St. Louis Rams, Warner finally got his shot when starter Trent Green was lost to a season-ending injury. A la Brady two years later, Warner led his team to a surprise Super Bowl championship, in an MVP season for the ages. He went on to add another MVP trophy, and two more (albeit unsuccessful) trips to the Super Bowl.

With a nickname like “Cinderella Man,” James J. Braddock was the original sports underdog. Unlike others on this list, Braddock had a quick start to his pro sports career, going 44-2-2 as a light heavyweight. But when he finally got his shot at the title against Tommy Loughran in 1929, Braddock lost the match in 15 rounds, and took his anger out on his poor right hand—fracturing it in multiple places. Braddock then fell into a deep depression, which wasn’t made any easier by the actual Depression. After losing 20 of his next 33 fights, Braddock hung up his gloves and started working as a longshoreman, also collecting welfare to support his family.

While his boxing career seemed all but kaput, he was given a fight opportunity in 1934, and worked his way up to a heavyweight title bout with Max Baer. A 10-1 underdog, nobody gave Braddock a shot, and Baer infamously refused to train for the fight. The elder Braddock (30) showed no quit, however, against Bear (26) and won the Heavyweight Championship.

Before there was Linsanity, there was Fernandomania. Hailing from Navajoa, Mexico, Fernando Valenzuela is a unique underdog in that it wasn’t about his talent, but rather, that he came out of nowhere (similar to a certain New York-area point guard). After playing in Mexican leagues as a teen, Valenzuela was signed by the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1979, and quickly thrived in the franchise’s minor league system.

In his first full season in 1981, Valenzuela started the first game of the season and went on to dominate the National League like few pitchers ever have. All the while, Valenzuela became a cultural icon for the Los Angeles Latino community, namely Mexican Americans, and Fernandomania soon swept the nation. Valenzuela became the first player in MLB history to win the Rookie of the Year and Cy Young Award in the same season, and to top things off, the Dodgers went on to win the '81 World Series.

It’s pretty safe to say there wouldn’t be a Michael Vick or a Cam Newton if it wasn’t for Warren Moon, the NFL’s pioneer African-American quarterback (with all due respect to Doug Williams). Still, while his career accomplishments include induction into both the NFL and CFL (Canadian Football League) Hall of Fames, Moon had to do everything in his power to convince coaches and scouts he was a quarterback, at a time when the concept of a black athlete at the position was foreign. Moon went (surprise) undrafted out of the University of Washington, despite beating the lauded Michigan Wolverines in the 1978 Rose Bowl, during his senior season. The reason for getting snubbed? Moon refused to switch positions.

He joined the CFL as an alternative and enjoyed immense success—leading the Edmonton Eskimos to five consecutive championships. Moon signed with the Houston Oilers in 1984, and while he never played in the Super Bowl, Moon was a top quarterback during his NFL career, racking up nine Pro Bowl and three All-Pro selections.

The list of NBA greats to go undrafted is short to nonexistent, depending on who you ask. There has never been an undrafted NBA MVP, and most likely, there never will be. There have been, however, a number of undrafted players who’ve found success in the NBA, and Ben Wallace is undoubtedly the greatest of them all. Undrafted out of Virginia Union (the alma mater of his mentor and former Knicks forward Charles Oakley), Wallace wasn’t viewed as a legitimate option by NBA teams, having played at a Division II school.

Wallace still managed to sign as a free agent with the Washington (then) Bullets, and carved out a steady role on the team by his third season. He then played one year for the Orlando Magic, before being traded to the Detroit Pistons for Grant Hill. It was in Detroit where Wallace cemented his legacy as one of the greatest defenders in NBA history, winning the league’s Defensive Player of the Year Award a record-tying four times. Wallace was also a four-time All-Star (most ever for an undrafted player) and helped lead the Pistons to an NBA Championship in 2004.

Sometimes it takes just a single, legendary performance to solidify yourself as one of the all-time greatest underdogs in sports. For Rulon Gardner, that moment came in the 2000 Summer Olympic Games in Sydney. That year, all of the competitions’ gold medals were up for grabs, except for, of course, Men’s Greco-Roman wrestling. Russian favorite Aleksandr Karelin wasn’t just undefeated in 13 years of international competition—he hadn’t given up a single point in six previous years of wrestling.

When Gardner squared off with Karelin in the gold medal match, he was an implied underdog, given no chance. Nonetheless, Gardner shocked the world and beat the unbeatable champion, in what is widely considered the biggest upset in the history of the Olympics. Gardner kept the run going by taking gold at the 2001 World Championships, until a series of accidents and injuries derailed his wrestling career. He also ballooned to 474 pounds, but thanks to TV’s The Biggest Loser, Gardner was able to lose 173 of said pounds.

Adversity is the name of the game when it comes to underdogs, whether it is the athlete’s race, nationality, background, or pedigree holding them back from glory. In the case of baseball pitcher Jim Abbott—it was his missing right hand. Yup, Abbott was born without his right hand, but never let a missing appendage get in the way of his aspirations of being a pro baseball player. Abbott (who also managed to play quarterback in high school) joined the (then) California Angels straight out of college, becoming a member of the starting rotation. He did so without any experience in the minors, and still finished fifth in voting for the American League Rookie of the Year.

Abbott went on to have a successful career between six MLB teams, thanks to a quickly timed technique of alternating his left hand for pitching and fielding with a glove. His career highlight came on Sept. 4, 1993, while pitching for the New York Yankees, when Abbott unfathomably threw a no-hitter against the Cleveland Indians.

In the same vein as Jim Abbott, Lance Armstrong was able to accomplish a great deal as an athlete while missing a vital body part—in this case, it was one of his testicles. Already an accomplished cyclist, Armstrong was diagnosed with stage three testicular cancer in 2006, which had spread to his lungs, abdomen and brain. After surgery to remove the cancerous testicle, Armstrong was given less than a 40 percent chance to live, let alone to ever cycle again. Despite the odds stacked against him, Armstrong fought back and was in complete remission by January 1998.

His comeback in cycling has been well documented—Armstrong went on to win a record seven straight Tour de France races. As a result, he became a poster boy for cancer survival and athletic perseverance. Unfortunately, doping allegations have somewhat tarnished Armstrong’s legacy, but not in everyone’s eyes.